Crimes Against Inanity
by digby
This Ralph Peters review of a new book featuring interviews with 30 famous conservatives has to be one of the creepiest I've ever read. It starts out by saying that "the left" wants to kill all the interview subjects in a murderous rage:
If our extreme left maintained a kill-or-capture list for the morning after the revolution (before they started arresting and executing each other), the 30 subjects interviewed in "Showdown with Evil" would fill out the top of its roster. In the left's view, the conservative and stubbornly independent voices captured in this book's rapid-fire chapters are guilty of crimes against inanity on two counts: Not only are they boldly, proudly and deliciously politically incorrect, but – far worse – their positions are based on facts, common sense and a positive view of the United States of America.
The left's problem with Guantanamo has never been what it is – leftists adore a good prison camp – but with who we put in it. The campus thought-police would love to round up and incarcerate these interviewees, who range from the courageous (Brigitte Gabriel, for example), through the venerable (Norman Podhoretz and the late William F. Buckley, Jr.), to the magnificently outrageous (Christopher Hitchens, an independent thinker of ferocious integrity). Elliot Abrams, Natan Sharansky, Richard Pipes, David Horowitz and dozens more. Dr. Glazov has gathered the most impressive collection of thinkers-in-freedom's-cause available in a single volume
It's interesting that Peters believes that he can see into the souls of the exterminationist American "left" to such an extent that he knows it wants to put conservative intellectuals in concentration camps. But then he (and the interview subjects in the book apparently) seem to be convinced that "the left" is the United States' greatest enemy, at least as bad as Al Qaeda, and far more violent and dangerous (if not for their cowardice and sloth):
Today's irresponsible leftists have more in common with the bloodthirsty French mob that alarmed Edmund Burke than with the theoreticians who, all good intentions and willful ignorance, destroyed the black American family with the cultural heroin of the Great Society. Of course, we may all be grateful that, unlike the mobs in the Place de la Concorde in the early 1790s, today's campus leftists are physical cowards: Given a choice between manning the barricades and seeking tenure, they will always choose the latter. Nor do they protest the "hegemony" of big banks by refusing to pay their mortgages.
Still, the left's rhetoric is sufficiently hateful (and self-adoring) to encourage nihilists, fascists and terrorists everywhere. Horowitz understands full well the cult-like thrall to which leftists enthusiastically submit, aggrandizing their own imaginary moral splendor by blaming others for all the world's ills: "Their dementia is to believe that if only enough Israelis/Christians/neo-conservatives are eliminated, the world will become a livable and just place." Of course, there will always be another "enemy of the people," no matter how many are shot in the back of the head or starved to death...
Or, as William F. Buckley Jr., succinctly puts it in a capstone interview: "The left has priorities, and the priority this time around is to damage the United States."
The mind reels.
I'm sure there are some Americans of all political stripes who have these violent fantasies, but the only people who seem to turn a profit by writing them down and sharing them with others in vivid detail are these right wingers.
And you have to just laugh at the final line:
In compiling this "greatest hits" volume from the countless splendid and valuable interviews he has conducted over the years, Jamie Glazov has revealed his own priority: The defense of intellectual, religious and physical freedom.
I don't know anyone who's agitating for the government to stop these people from publishing their paranoid tracts (or putting them in concentration camps) but I do know that they wouldn't be able to sell them without the mass delusion that they are under siege from a fantasy leftism that only exists in their turgid imaginations. They remind me of those children who had their minds implanted with false molestation memories by crackpot police psychologists. It wasn't true, but it didn't matter --- the kids "remembered" it as if it were.
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